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Sunday, 20 March 2016

The Doris Gordon Memorial Trust: Honouring Our
Prejudiced Past?

By Morgan Healey
and Alison McCulloch

Over 2015, the US
witnessed a groundswell of campus-based racial justice activism. From Missouri
to Princeton University, Black Lives Matter activists and their counterparts
honed in on ongoing racial oppression and injustice at universities, and called
the institutions’ leaders to account. Activists have asserted a range of
mechanisms for addressing these issues, including universities removing the names
of historical figures that promoted white supremacy from campus halls and
departments.

Internationally,
the actions of US activists have had a ripple effect, challenging the
memorialisation of people who perpetuated and sustained beliefs in the racial
inferiority of non-whites while reaffirming their own supposed racial
superiority as white (mostly) men. The tale we tell below draws on these
challenges within the historical and cultural location of Aotearoa New Zealand
in the context of sexual and reproductive health. As two white/Pākehā authors,
we suggest that, in the spirit of cleaning our own house, contesting white
supremacy should also be done by those with white privilege and that we must
play a role in opposing the ongoing veneration of historical figures that propagated
racial and gendered inequalities.

Re-imagining an imperfect past

Our story begins
at the most recent conference of The Royal Australian and New Zealand College
of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, where a defunct trust in the name of a
mid-20th century physician, Dr. Doris Gordon, was relaunched in
conjunction with the National Council of Women. According to the Trust rules, it aims “to promote, undertake, sponsor, co-operate in
or otherwise further the study and/or the teaching and/or the practice of
women's health and wellbeing in New Zealand”.Funding will
be used to hold an annual Doris Gordon Memorial Lecture by awarding a chosen
lecturer with a medal and honorarium. The honorarium will be used for the study, teaching,
and/or the practice of women's heath and wellbeing in New Zealand, exemplifying the spirit of Dr. Gordon’s
work.

As part of his Inaugural Doris Gordon Memorial Oration, lauding the work of the renewed Trust’s namesake, Professor
Ronald Jones told the audience of Dr. Gordon’s work in setting New Zealand obstetrics
on a sound footing, stating that she had “made a greater contribution to the health
and welfare of New Zealand women and children than any other individual”. Then,
with only a passing and absolving reference, he proceeded to dismiss Dr. Gordon’s
indisputably offensive beliefs on contraception, abortion, class and race as
artifacts of her time with little or no bearing on her legacy.

For the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand
(ALRANZ) this raised a serious red flag. Is it possible or even prudent to
erase the hateful and bigoted aspects of Gordon’s past in order to glorify her
positive contributions? Does the past really have such little bearing on the
present that we can selectively ignore part of an individual’s complex
biography without consequence? And what does it mean for modern obstetrics that
a founding member of the profession believed that contraception and abortion
were social evils, and professed the racial superiority of white/Pākehā people?
We believe it is dangerous to assume that the prejudices of the past have been
eradicated and that the legacies of social reformers can be re-imagined anew,
their harmful beliefs stripped neatly away.

Paralleling other
Western settler-colonial states, Aotearoa New Zealand’s present fits into a
long history of efforts to control certain bodies, the effects of which are
disproportionately felt by Māori and Pasifika women, poorer women, and gender
non-conforming people. This is reflected in New Zealand’s current abortion laws,
which still treat abortion as a crime (see the Crimes Act, 1961 and the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act, 1977 for more). Criminalisation means
abortion is not integrated into the healthcare system and access to services are
complicated because of the restrictions imposed by legal fiat. For the most
vulnerable and marginalised, this can mean the difference between bodily
autonomy and state control; exhibited in policies like neoliberal welfare
reform, which has sought to regulate and control the sexual activity and
reproductive decisions of women, particularly Māori and Pasifika women. The ubiquity
of such damaging disciplinary systems are not new to twenty-first century Aotearoa,
but have roots in historical ideologies like the ones promoted by Dr. Gordon
and her contemporaries.

While overt eugenicist
discourses are no longer acceptable, racial and gendered dog whistling is
common, and employed to similar effect today. Consider Dr. Gordon’s discussion
in her book, “Gentlemen of the Jury” (1937)– an anti-abortion polemic she
co-authored with an ostensibly reluctant Dr. Francis Bennett – of ‘New Zealand’ (read ‘white’) women’s duty to
act as the custodian of the race, and her condemnation of them for the “abuse”
of birth control:

It is worth remembering …
that the abuse of birth control knowledge in New Zealand has already reduced
this country to a dangerous state of stagnation, and, coupled with the rising
tide of abortions, threatens in a very few years to extinguish its white
people.

Have these notions
vanished from contemporary society? No. The construction of a distinct ‘New
Zealand’ identity typically assumes a de facto white body, and erases or
ignores the indigenous Māori. Similarly, while explicitly pro-natalist policies
that insist womanhood is synonymous with motherhood may no longer be viable, women
in New Zealand continue to carry the lion’s share of childcare responsibilities
and suffer from a gender pay gap those
responsibilities help cause. All of these discourses, with their deep
historical roots, persist in producing gender and racial inequalities that are
very much apparent today.

The persistence of
these inequities is precisely why the glorification of Dr. Gordon's work is so
problematic. It contributes to a false present and a dishonest past. We see the
effects around us every day, in the stigmatisation and criminalisation of
abortion, and the damage caused by a welfare system that treats single mothers
and their daughters as objects that need to have their reproduction controlled.
What disappears from national discussions is the fact that the bodies these systems
seek to control are overwhelmingly those of poorer women, of Māori and other
women of color, and that this control is justified by racist and gendered
constructions of non-white womanhood.

An Enlightened Present?

This brings us
back to the point made at the outset: that old ideologies are fashioned anew in
the present day, neither erased or fixed. Often this is done by constructing
linear stories of progress that celebrate our enlightened present, and suggests
that race matters less today than it did during our unenlightened past*. Such
progressive storytelling often relies on the (re)telling of the lives of
influential people who informed the thinking of the time. However, we run a
serious risk of perpetuating an imagined ‘post-racial’ present when we lean on
the stories of key historical figures (most often white) to justify these
progressive narratives.

Today, many in New
Zealand live a very different reality from the ideal of a just and equal
present. Māori continue to struggle to have their voices heard, their histories
acknowledged. Every corner of the country is filled with stories of land theft,
of cultural suppression, of punishment for speaking their Reo, for
practising traditional healing, and so on. In the mid 20-century, when
Dr. Gordon was practicing medicine, Māori infant morality rates were three
times those of white/Pākehā, while their overall rates of death and
imprisonment, and of diseases associated with poverty also outstripped those of
white New Zealanders. Contemporary statistics highlight that these inequities
persist, marking the inequality between Māori and non-Māori as a continuing
national narrative. It is, as Evan Te Ahu Poata-Smith wrote in “Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis”, an
enduring feature of New Zealand society.

We do New Zealand
a disservice when we claim an enlightened present that is built on false
narratives of progress, including the disassociation of historical figures from
their racist or misogynist beliefs. In relaunching the Doris Gordon Memorial
Trust and rewarding those who exemplify her legacy, we risk more than simply
commemorating an imperfect women; we risk negating the connections between past
and present, the linking of structural inequalities through New Zealand’s
colonial history. Until we can acknowledge our own history, in discussions
about issues like welfare reform, law and order, or reproductive and sexual
health, then we will simply re-inscribe anew the racial and gendered prejudices like
those held by Dr. Gordon and her cohort. Like Black Lives Matter activists in
the US, it is our responsibility to contest these narratives and to hold
predominately white institutions to account for the veneration of people and
legacies that continue to exact a human toll.

The alternative is
allowing gendered and racial inequalities to persist uncontested, as we refuse
to interrogate the present within the context of the past.

Morgan Healey (PhD) recently moved from New Zealand
back to her native U.S. She is a sexual and reproductive health advocate and
researcher. Alison McCulloch is a freelance journalist and author based in
Tauranga Moana. Both Alison and Morgan are members of the Abortion Law Reform
Association of New Zealand.

1 comment:

Thank you both very much for this post. Today I happened to look at the Work and Income site setting out the conditions for getting the sole parent benefit. They include this:"If you're on a benefit and have another child, when your new child turns one year old you may have a change in obligations, depending on the age of your next youngest child.If your next youngest child is:•under five years old you'll need to continue to take practical steps to prepare for work •between five and 13 you'll be expected to actively seek part-time work of at least 15 hours a week and accept any suitable job•14 or older you'll be expected to actively seek full-time work of at least 30 hours a week and accept any suitable job."Echoes of the past, indeed.